April 8, 2011: Long Houston Weekend

Today is our travel day down to Houston for a three day weekend.  I went in to the office and worked all day.  Nothing exciting happened during the day.

I had been planning on going home for lunch today but instead I got stuck helping Brian out with something that took all of my lunch period.  So that disrupted my plans a bit.  We grabbed a really quick bite at Rockfish after wrapping up the work and then back to the office.

Around seven thirty Dominica, Liesl and Brian swung down to the office in Irving, since it was on the way out of town, and picked me up.  I arranged with work to leave my car at the office over the weekend.  The office runs around the clock and there is constantly security both in the building and out in the parking in lot plus the lot where I park is completely exposed to a department that never shuts down (global network command center) so there is just about no chance whatsoever that anyone would risk messing with my beat up old car.

We got on the road and headed south.  Traffic was not bad.  We stopped at Wendy’s on the road and ate there.  It is lent so they have fish on the menu.  Their fish is good – it is really sad that they only offer it for a little bit every year.  I think that they really do themselves a disservice making a point of servicing Catholics’ dietary needs but not pescatarians.  In doing so they alienate some of their potential diners (but don’t appear to care since they turn them away eleven months of the year) and confuse the others (what Catholic observing lent knows that Wendy’s changes their menu just for lent?)  Of course, dropping their industry leading French fries for the stuff that they have now doesn’t seem like a good move to me either.  They had unique fries that made them a fry “destination”.  Now they have super-salty, get them anywhere generic fries that aren’t even worth eating if you are already there let along going out of your way to get.  I’m sure that they are much cheaper to produce but how many customers are you willing to give up just to be cheap?

We dropped Brian off at the Baymont in North Houston where they know him well.  Then it was on down to Francesca’s house.  We got in around one in the morning and were pretty tired.  Liesl did very well on the drive down even though she really did not nap at all.  That is good, though, because it will make it a lot easier for her to be able to sleep tonight.

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